Flu, Hurricanes Show Need for Backup Plans

If your school is forced to close this fall, do you have a plan to continue instruction online? Some colleges and universities are currently working on this contingency, according to a number of media reports. Those who teach face-to-face courses may especially need to be thinking about a Plan B. But even those who use Blackboard and other course delivery software exclusively should consider some potential problems. For instance, students may not have access to computers at home or they may only have dial-up Internet service—which won't do for many software programs.

According to recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) by Jeffrey R. Young, many institutions are currently training their faculty and staff on the logistics of adapting to distance instruction if the need arises. The biggest threat nationwide, of course, is the H1N1 flu, which has already started to spread in the northern hemisphere as schools around the country begin a new academic year. Here in Texas, as we all know, we are also in hurricane season. Even if electricity is restored fairly soon after a big storm, there can be structural damage that is longer-lasting, as Gulf Coast community colleges have experienced over the last several years.

Faculty in-service could be the perfect time to consider such matters, if your school has not planned such a program already. At the very least, it's worth thinking about individually.

Here are a couple of choice passages from the piece:

If an outbreak of swine flu or some other crisis closes its campus, Northern Virginia Community College plans to still be open. The college is training classroom-based professors in the basics of online teaching as part of its emergency plan to shift large numbers of courses to the Web.

"You don't want to shut your institution down and say 'Sorry'—especially with the technology and tools that we have," says Steven G. Sachs, vice president for instructional and information technology for the college. Northern Virginia has established a set of "minimum competencies" for Blackboard, its course-management system, and has scheduled a training in early September to help professors meet them.

The college is one of several institutions updating their emergency plans to include teaching in virtual classrooms if physical ones become unusable for a few weeks.

While many colleges have worked on emergency planning in the past few years, many have focused on warning students and professors of danger and on protecting people and data. Now that those arrangements have been made, institutions are turning to contingencies to keep courses going after an initial crisis passes. Some college leaders are working to start a national center to help institutions develop "academic continuity plans," as such blueprints are called.

And:

Despite their comfort with computers, professors and students struggled to adapt, officials say. Some professors scrambled to record podcasts of their remaining lectures, while others typed out and posted the text of lectures they had planned to deliver in person. "Any faculty member you talk to on the campus would say, Yeah, it was really difficult to rethink classes as online only," says Margaret Dahlberg, interim vice president of academic affairs.

And some students had trouble finding reliable Internet access. Some had no connections at the places they were staying while the campus was closed, or only dial-up links that were too slow to handle audio and video, says Ms. Dahlberg. "We're a pretty rural state," she added, noting that many homes are not served by high-speed Internet carriers. Many students—and some professors—had to travel to coffee shops or public libraries to log in.

Several courses—including a few music courses—were deemed too tricky to teach online, and so the college skipped the last three weeks of them and gave the students the grade they had earned so far.